What influence and inspiration can the occult have on artists and their work?
Is it a mental thing? Will help me work more intelligently?
Will it give me visual inspiration? Are vision real and memorable? Are they worth illustrating for others to see?
What kind of things would an artist gain from it?
I'm a big fan of H.R. Giger, however I have only the vaguest of understandings of his involvement in the occult.
I find his work to be beautiful, with vivid imagery and intricate design that seems almost primordial.
As an artist currently in a slump lacking inspiration what could I gain from the occult?
It is worth my or any other creative persons' time?
>>17838147
I'm just watching a few documentaries on him right now, but he doesn't talk much about occult subjects
>>17838238
Giger's like Clive Barker, he knows way more than he lets on:
>"Magic is a very serious subject for me but I wouldn't be playing fair with what I know to pass any of that along. Being, by its very nature, outside language, some of this stuff has to remain unsaid and unspoken . It's a very serious study for me."
~Clive, 1995
To support this position, compare Giger's art here with the Stele of Revealing (Ankh-af-na-Khonsu) in the next post.
>>17838254
>>17838254
Have you got any sources of Giger's interest and involvement aside from photographs and his art?
>>17838315
From a resource chronicling the goings on of the Swiss branch of the OTO (who rejected Crowley and kept the Kellner/Reuss rituals). Metzger was their head...I dunno who runs the shit these days, only that after Aeschbach died (whom H.B. aka Bill Breeze treated like shit) funds were merged with Ernst Graf and Adalbert Schmid:
***
Winner of an Oscar for his literally visceral designs for the film Alien (offal from an abbatoir was used in the special effects), the artist Hansruedi (H.R.) Giger was contacted in 1977 by Ulla von Bernus, a selfstyled priestess of Satan, who along with her girlfriend and Giger made a trip to Stein, staying overnight. Frau von Bernus, according to Giger (once he had made his mind up about her) had "come hence thence" with the intention of celebrating a great many magical rituals. Giger had gone in the hope of finding drawings by Crowley, but in vain; he came away from Stein with just a bottle of the 'Swedish Elixir of Life', and a dust-jacket from one of Gustav Meyrink's books — later lost, which was "very distressing" for him. After the visit to Stein, Frau Bernus and Herr Giger were the guests of Oscar Schlag, who impressed them both very much.
In Giger's opinion, Fräulein Aeschbach and Metzger were perfectly pleasant and harmless. Nevertheless, he wanted nothing more to do with either Frau von Bernus, or with Stein; to him they seemed "so comical and so 'heavy'." [72]
>>17838352
Frau Bernus later described Metzger as a "drab little magician", and recounted the events of their arrival in the evening, and the performance of the Gnostic Mass the next morning.
On Saturday evening a "booze-up" had been held, with communion-wine "of the best sort" to drink, which had however made the "women jittery." Frau Borgert and Fräulein Aeschbach had become "hysterically jealous" of Frau Bernus, she recalls. When they were going up to their respective rooms later, Frau Bernus had hardly talked to her friend, as they suspected the room was "completely bugged". In the middle of the night she had been woken up by someone fiddling at her keyhole; Metzger apparently wanted to come in and "tidy up"! Needless to say, he didn't get a chance to do that...
Next morning at the Gnostic Mass, the part of "page" was played by a 72-year-old "grandpa", beneath whose vestments a pair of stout shoes still covered with mud from the gardens could be discerned. Spread out on the front-most pew, to Frau Bernus's amazement, was a great heap of paper handkerchiefs. During the actual celebration of the Mass, when Frau Borgert had knelt down, Metzger suddenly forgot his lines, and asked "Where's my glasses?" quite audibly. The glasses however were not to be found, and Metzger could now only "mutter under his breath" instead of reading his lines. The paper hankies must have been there so Metzger could clean his glasses, the Priestess of Satan conjectured.
Later, Frau Bernus found the glasses lying on the floor just outside her bedroom door, where Metzger had presumably been kneeling the previous night. She returned them to him at lunchtime, which "richly amused" her. [73]
***
Koenig's sauce?
>Hansruedi Giger, telephone conversation on 23.1.88.
